“Abortions of the Market”: Production and Reproduction in News from Nowhere
2010; Routledge; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08905495.2010.493447
ISSN1477-2663
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I am indebted to Paul Peppis, Richard L. Stein, Joseph Fracchia, and anonymous reviewers for their comments on early drafts of this paper. An early draft of portions of this paper was presented at the 2002 Institute for Culture and Society at Carnegie Mellon University, and I am grateful to the participating members of the Marxist Literary Group for their feedback. [1] In Archaeologies of the Future (2005 Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future, New York: Verso. [Google Scholar]), Jameson says of his 2004 “The Politics of Utopia,” “the essay is something of an early and tentative sketch of positions more fully developed in the present book” (15). I cite both works here. [2] Critics have long assumed Morris’s ignorance of, and disdain towards, the scientific debates of his day. Thus Parrinder, even while establishing the influence of eugenics discourse on Morris, cautions that Morris employed eugenics only “insofar as he gave any thought to matters of human biology” at all (4–5). I hope to show that matters of human biology figured centrally into his thoughts on art, socialism, and history. [3] William Greenslade provides an excellent account of the ubiquity of “degenerationism” in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century British culture: Degenerationism, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940. [4] As Diane Paul shows, these “class prejudices” among the British left were not unique to the Fabians I cite above (584). Even among many leaders of the socialist movement, E. P. Thompson argues, “the proletariat appeared as primarily a destructive force” (292). [5] Morris here follows Ruskin, who also favors the word “degradation.” In “The Nature of Gothic,” for example, Ruskin writes of the “cheapness” which “is to be got only by the degradation of the workman” (180), and, conversely, of the “undegraded grace” of a Gothic cathedral (189). [6] Morris echoes Engels, who posits in “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” that labor enables the evolution of homo sapiens by shaping the human hand over time (e.g., through the use of tools), thereby allowing for the free development of the human brain. While the essay is not published until 1896, Engels drafts it in 1876. It is possible that Engels discussed his ideas with Morris, or even showed him a draft. Considering Engels’s low regard for Morris as a Marxist intellectual, however, it is equally probable that Morris reaches his conclusions independently. [7] In a Commonweal article published in 1888, Morris writes of his hope that sexuality, among other things, will be free of Victorian moral constrictions following the socialist revolution and subsequent rearrangement of social codes: “Shall we [then] be ashamed of our love and our hunger and mirth, and believe that it is wicked of us not to try to dispense with the joys that accompany procreation of our species, and the keeping of ourselves alive, those joys of desire which make us understand that the beasts too may be happy?” (Political Writings 338–39). [8] All quotations from E. P. Thompson are from the revised 1977 edition of his William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, and not to the edition appearing in 1950. [9] Morris’s description of capitalism’s attempts to divide human beings along class lines into separate species in this and other essays may well have inspired H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Wells begins his A Modern Utopia (1904) with a critique of News from Nowhere. See also Carl Freedman. [10] In the review of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward he published the year before News from Nowhere, Morris similarly notes that mechanized production will foster increase for the sake of increase rather than (as Bellamy suggests) alleviating the human burden of labor: “the multiplication of machinery will just – multiply machinery” (Political Writings 424). [11] Morris elsewhere describes his own “unreasoning, sensuous pleasure in handiwork” (qtd. in Dowling 52). [12] Parrinder notes the reproductive and eugenic significance of bathing scenes in Morris’s The Well at the World’s End: As the “Galahad of a materialistic and, indeed, a eugenic age,” Morris’s protagonist is “provide[d] with a female counterpart, Ursula, who will become the mother of his children. Immediately after they drink from the Well, Ralph and Ursula bathe naked in the sea together, and they find that the scars and physical blemishes on their bodies have miraculously vanished. Their quest is consummated in this scene of idealised nudity, of ‘health and efficiency’” (7). [13] An effort to reintroduce salmon into the Thames was begun in the late 1970s, and has met with limited success. [14] The inclusion of the Kelmscott Manor marks the projection of Morris’s own erotic fantasies: Morris knew that his wife, Jane, conducted numerous affairs in Kelmscott—in fact he left for long intervals in order to make way for her lovers—so returning to the house in the erotically charged utopia with a woman who shared Jane’s beauty but who, unlike Jane, shared Morris’s own intellectual and political interests, may well have functioned as a fantastic reclamation of his own romantic and erotic life. [15] “[I]n utopia,” Jameson writes, “politics is supposed to be over, along with History.” Ellen’s concern for the future (and Old Hammond’s suggestion that subsequent eras may follow) suggests that Morris may be critiquing the idea of the stagnant, post‐historical utopia. Jameson underestimates Morris in stating that in Nowhere we find a utopia characterized by a “meaningless biological succession of the generations in a society which no longer knows either the meaning of History or the metaphysics of religion” (“Politics” 39). [16] For a thorough discussion of the relation between News from Nowhere and Bloch’s “utopian hermeneutics,” see Carl Freedman. [17] Jan Marsh notes that “[l]ust […] works throughout the text, as a dynamic metaphor or carriage for utopian desire, just as Ellen stands, in her strange wild beauty, as a personification of the new age, at once alluring and unattainable” (22). [18] “Nowhere and William Guest,” Suvin continues, “are two polar aspects of Morris the author—the healing, achieved hope and the wounded, hoping subject” (186). [19] The phrase “well‐knit” bears real significance for Morris, who had a sincere appreciation for the labor necessary in the production of a “well‐knit” work after reviving and mastering several defunct fiber arts. [20] Parrinder, overlooking Morris’s emphasis on labor as well as Dick’s clear explication of the disease’s hereditary source, accepts the old man’s conclusion. [21] Morris further indicates that idleness is the disease of the bourgeoisie as the old man reasons that the sickness must have been quite contagious, since many of the afflicted remained secluded and had to be “waited upon by a special class” (76). [22] The only work the Idlers consented to do was tending booths at the markets; perhaps they sought shelter in this residual vestige of the commercial marketplace out of nostalgia for capitalism. [23] In citing sexual and domestic reproduction alongside one another, I am drawing from Susan Himmelweit’s discussion of the multiple forms of “reproductive” labor women are expected to pursue (470–71). [24] Morris denotes by exclusion the inferior status of women’s role in sexual reproduction and women’s reproductive work: though his utopia claims to value maternity, the book omits it entirely, offering no examples of pregnant women or babies in its many portrayals of working conditions under communism, and insisting in addition that the work of raising children is superfluous—in Nowhere the children run off at an early age to raise themselves. [25] When Guest points out that the division of domestic work among the sexes seems unfair, Old Hammond responds by noting that housework is important and “deserving of respect” (94). After recalling a folk‐tale which instructs us that men are not capable of housekeeping, Old Hammond adds, “don’t you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house‐mates about her look pleased, and are grateful to her? And then, you know, everybody likes to be ordered about by a pretty woman: why, it is one of the pleasantest forms of flirtation” (94). [26] In “modern art,” Morris finds, there is no school or tradition “but such as each man of talent or genius makes for himself to serve his craving for the expression of his thought while he is alive, and to perish with his death” (Collected Works 22: 206).
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